Mikaela Shiffrin has been justly famous in the ski racing world since 2010, and that seems to have skewed our assessment of her. She is 26. But because she made her World Cup debut at 15 and won an Olympic gold medal eight years ago, she seems older.
That makes it harder to think of her as being at midcareer, but it is very likely true. Shiffrin’s stumbles in the opening races of the Beijing Olympics were unfathomable — failures, she later called them — but as she enters her final individual race at these Winter Games on Thursday in China (Wednesday night in the United States), a long Olympic journey is still ahead for her.